


to the swift

by Whreflections



Series: Post Carry On Feels Sampler Box [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Incest, M/M, Sam's marriage isn't platonic but also isn't a romance, Sibling Incest, Winchesters in Heaven, but tagging just to be safe, the underage is all in the past and briefly mentioned, the wincest is the point here y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27654941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: "I returned and saw under the sun that— The race is not to the swift, Nor the battle to the strong, Nor bread to the wise, Nor riches to men of understanding, Nor favor to men of skill; But time and chance happen to them all."If waiting to be with Dean in Heaven is the gift Sam can give to the brother who's given him everything, that's exactly what he's going to do.  Even if it means he has to fight every single day.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester/Original Finale Wife
Series: Post Carry On Feels Sampler Box [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2035330
Comments: 7
Kudos: 43





	to the swift

**Author's Note:**

> About 6 years ago, after the season 9 finale, I sat down and wrote a fic about Sam washing Dean’s body after Metatron killed him. That Sam had the thought in his mind that what he’d really wanted to say to Dean, more than anything else, was to ask Dean not to leave him—even as he regretted that he’d never been able to be as strong for Dean when he was dying the way Dean always was for him. He’d never been able to tell him it was okay. 
> 
> I watched that all play out in live action last night, and I sobbed my fucking eyes out. It was beautiful, and a beautiful reminder of why these two are my favorite boys—favorite to write, and watch, and read. Platonic and otherwise; I love both equally. They’re the characters I know best in all the world. 
> 
> So, because I had to, here’s something…I can’t even entirely say to soothe because it hurts, but here’s fic from the heart of a dedicated Supernatural family member and wincester, who loves these boys with every inch of my soul. 
> 
> Supernatural will never die.

There are promises, and promises. 

Some you keep in a safe inside your bones; others you hold in your palm like a cage of spun caramel. You don’t mean to break it—how could you? It’s beautiful, delicate and perfect—but it’s fragile as hell, and your hands are warm, and before you know it it’s dissolving down, crackling before your eyes, slipping through your fingers. 

Sam sits in the library at the bunker, and taps his fingers on the table. 

He could find a hand to play. There’s no such thing as no option, no recourse—haven’t he and Dean proven that time and again? If no one is dealing, you find out why. You make it worth it. Find the players, learn their game, and when the time is right, take the piece that you want. He can’t say that he doesn’t consider it—he can’t say that he doesn’t sit there until Miracle’s pissed on the floor in the corner and his palm feels raw from periodically rubbing it slow over the wood. 

He could solve this puzzle. He’s saved the world, more than once. Nothing he sets his mind to is impossible, and this doesn’t have to be, either. He can make his own loophole; he can have his brother back in the chair across from him—and whatever he said, once he was there, Dean would forgive him. 

It wouldn’t even take seconds—it’d be immediate. One look, and Dean would have his arms around him. Even if he told him off later for whatever he’d done, that much Sam is certain of—Dean would take any chance to be back at his side, and he wouldn’t hate it, even being pulled out of Heaven. 

He doesn’t doubt it for a second, but the memory of the barn is equally solid. Dean’s hands around his; Dean’s forehead against his. The way he’d let himself plead, just that once. 

_Tell me it’s okay._

For so much of his life, Dean had never asked him for anything, not really—not more than he gave. How many times had Sam wished there was more he could do—how many times all those years ago had he flexed his fingers in the dark and thought to himself that killing Alistair the way he had wasn’t vengeance enough? Had he not confessed in that church at what he’d thought would be the end that his greatest regret was how often he let his brother down?

Dean would forgive him; he always does—but this time, Sam isn’t going to ask him to. 

Not even if he has to have this same argument with himself every goddamn day for the rest of his life. 

******

He has the argument every day. 

Sometimes, it hits him in the morning with the alarm and the light of the sun, the absence of Dean’s weight against his back and his groan when the clock radio in a motel room plays Kiss. 

_Look, I’m not hating on them, okay? I’m just saying, they’re more into their makeup than their music, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the makings of a classic rock band. I just don’t think they deserve all the hype._

If he lays very still, it’s almost like a ghost, the memory of Dean in Vermont or Oklahoma or Nevada, squint eyed and sleepy, bitching about Gene Simmons. It’s there in his mind, but he can’t roll over and throw his arm around Dean’s waist and tell him to shut up. He can’t shove him back into the pillows or up and out of the bed, can’t sit up and kiss him mid-sentence, sleepy and off tempo with a brief knock of teeth. 

He lays instead in an empty bed, and clutches at the sheets until his fingernails hurt. 

Osiris is the god of resurrection. He exists in the world; he has to. If Sam summons him, he could bind him. If he binds him, he could make a deal. 

His fingers clench and clench, until he wins. 

Sometimes, winning means he doesn’t get out of bed for the rest of the day. 

******

Eliza Russell is the niece of Luella Russell, a woman who took to the road and learned her trade after she saw firsthand the power of a curse. She’s long gone, but her legacy isn’t—her name is in the journal, listened under a number that doesn’t work anymore. He meets Eliza in Texas, both on the job, and it’s only then that they put the pieces together. 

In another life, they probably met, once or twice. She thinks she remembers Dean; Sam thinks he remembers her aunt’s RV, the devil’s trap she’d stitched into her patio awning. It’s been too long for clarity on pieces of his life that fade into the background—the only part of Texas in ’91 that’s crisp in his mind is he and Dean sneaking onto a farm, pretending for half a day to be cowboys because it’s what Sam wanted. 

Dust on their hands, the smell of cows. The utter radiance of Dean’s smile when he’d laughed his fucking ass off after Sam dropped his motel key down the cattle guard. 

He and Eliza finish the case together, and fuck in a Motel 8 with outlets so shitty the alarm clock comes unplugged from the movements of the bedframe. They both miss checkout, and when they wake up to housekeeping hammering on the door, it’s nice to laugh not just with someone but with her—this spark of life he’s found who may or may not have known him when he felt like the world was real. 

Months later, on a dock outside Fairbanks, she proves to him just how much she understands, with her cold hands pressed under his shirt, her head just resting against his shoulder.

_You’re always half somewhere else, aren’t you, Sam?_

There’s no accusation in it. She knows where he is. 

_Did he ever see this place?_

In the back of his mind, the old argument stirs. The magic is different, here. Each region has their own flavor; Alaska runs deep, and wild. He could find someone with the right spell, if he looks hard enough—if he’s willing to get the right components. Nothing worth having ever comes cheap.

Sam swallows, and tells her about the time Dean called him at Stanford from Nome, on a line that was breaking up, bitching about what the salt on the road would do to the car. 

His eyes burn, and Sam doesn’t even pretend it’s the wind. If she’s going to stay, if he’s going to let her, there can be no secrets. He’s too tired, too old for pretense, and too young for how he feels. Let her do with the truth what she will. 

******

In another era, someone might have called it a marriage of convenience. In his own, Sam sticks with certainties—Eliza is the only friend he has left alive, steel strong and still soft enough to catch him when he breaks. She’s there when he makes the decision to take Miracle to the vet for the last time; he’s there when she tells him that he’s going to be a father, and if he wants to be, a dad. 

Nothing about Sam’s life feels convenient, but it isn’t love, either. Not how the vows describe it. It’s the love of a friend at the last port in a storm who would fight hell and high water to give him a light—that, he can promise her in return. More than that he doesn’t have left to give, and she knows. She knows. 

It isn’t exclusive; it isn’t traditional. It keeps him from feeling like he’s forever on the verge of absolutely losing his mind. 

In the hospital, he tries to thank her for agreeing with the name, but he can’t get it out, and he doesn’t have to. 

_You think I wouldn’t want to be mother to the next Dean Winchester?_ It’s soft, and wry; somehow she can manage both, and neither hurt. She means every word. 

******

Dean holds a baseball bat many times before he ever holds a gun. 

When he does, Sam’s hands guide around his littler ones, nudging his fingers into place, holding him steady. He’s prepared for weeks, and still his voice cracks.

_Your uncle always taught me—_

Dean leans into him, and somehow he makes it, but the old itch is right there, tickling at his throat as he watches his boy take his first shots at a target. 

Dean, _his_ Dean should be there to see him with his boy, even if he’d throw a fit and say he’s too young, even if he’d haul him back to the house and tear Sam a new one. With the right weapon, he could have an in with the angels. For the right price, they could have Dean home long before his baby’s ever old enough to consider taking him on a job. 

Dean’s aim is shit. At the end of the clip, he nicks one of the outer rings on the target, and looks back at Sam over his shoulder with such utter unbridled delight.

_I don’t think I’m too good at this, dad._

He can’t say he isn’t conflicted—but the words that rise unsaid against the roof of his mouth can’t be denied. 

_Thank Jack for that_. 

******

Almost everyone’s first memory is a lie. 

Early childhood memories can’t hold from the age most people think they can—but if you hear and old story often enough, you might start to think you remember it. That time you banged your head on the corner of the piano bench learning to walk; that time you saw your first cat and didn’t know how the hell to process it. It’s a weird transference of point of view, and yet it happens all the time. 

Sam knows that—he knew it in college; he knows it again after helping Dean with his psychology homework years ago. Still, he’d bet his life on knowing that the memory he hasn’t isn’t an illusion. 

It isn’t fire. It isn’t even the hot leather of the Impala seat in the sun. 

It’s a motel from when they first started travelling, city unknown. The light from the parking lot lights streams in through half open blinds, and he’s crying hard enough that it’s loud to his own ears—and still he can hear Dean’s voice, little and high, still, soft with sleep.

_I got him, dad._

It isn’t a complete memory. He knows from his father’s retelling that he in a few moments picked him up; that they all fell asleep in the same bed—he knows that safety, somewhere, but in the version he remembers, though he can feel his dad’s presence like an anchor, it’s only Dean he sees, the blue-white light from the window washing out his face, smoothing it into something that looked older than he was. 

_It’s okay, Sammy; did you have a bad dream? It happens to me, too._

Maybe it isn’t, technically, his first memory—but when he looks back, Dean is the first thing he knows. 

Of course, _of course_ Heaven isn’t any different. 

******

With so much time in-between, he is, technically, the older brother, now. 

Sam doesn’t feel it, and he never will. He’s Dean’s baby brother, always and forever; that’s a constant he’d fight to keep. 

It’s only with Dean’s arm tight around him that he can let out the pressure that pressed on him for decades, lodged like thorns in his throat. 

“I wanted to do something. I wanted to get you back every single fucking day, and, Dean, so many times I almost—”

Even in that slight waver, Dean’s there to catch him. 

“Hey, hey. It’s okay. Of course you wanted to—but you didn’t.”

“I barely held it together;” Sam says. The truth lifts another weight from his shoulders. “I came so close, so many times; I can’t even tell you—it wasn’t brave. When it came down to it, I just couldn’t let you down, but that’s all it was. That’s all that kept me from it, every single day. I had to fight so hard even for that—”

In the long second it takes for Dean’s palm to curve against the damp of his cheek, Sam knows—and still, nothing on Heaven or Earth could dampen the jolt it brings to his heart to hear it said. 

Dean’s eyes are clear; his thumb as warm and calloused in this place as it ever was in life. 

“I’m so proud of you.”

The first time they kissed was on a bridge in Oregon. Smack in the middle of fall, walking home from a bar called Dante’s. He was 16, and he’d been jealous all night. 16, and Dean pulling him in when Sam had lunged forward to kiss him felt like how he imagined it might at the moment fire starts to take. 

Dean had kissed him back with shocking tenderness, enough to drag all the fight right out of his lungs. He couldn’t argue over what Dean had given those strangers, not anymore. What he gave to Sam, Dean had never given to anyone. Sam knew him well enough to feel the truth. 

This time, he waits for Dean to make the first move, knowing the wait he’s had is nothing, nothing on the seconds Dean takes to breathe him in. It flashes in his mind to ask Dean what it is he smells, if it’s Sam or if it’s home—but in the instant Dean’s mouth presses to his, he knows that answer, too. 

**Author's Note:**

> ...yeah, I gotta say it. The race wasn't to the swift, but they won, and so did we. Congratulations to all of us on seeing an ending like this for our soulmates- I love these boys, and this fandom, and that means all of you reading this. 
> 
> If you want to read it, that fic I mentioned in my first note is here-
> 
> http://www.archiveofourown.org/works/1666847


End file.
